I tried lilyponddist¶

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Today I discovered the lilyponddist package and tried it. It works:

>>> import requests
>>> import lilyponddist
>>> import subprocess

>>> url = "https://lilypond.org/ly-examples/bach-bwv610.ly"
>>> src = "/tmp/tmp.ly"
>>> out = "/tmp/tmp"
>>> r = requests.get(url)
>>> open(src, "wt").write(r.text)
4940
>>> subprocess.call([lilyponddist.lilypondbin(), '--pdf', '-o', out, src])
0
>>> subprocess.call(["xdg-open", out + '.pdf'])
0

The console output is something like this:

Processing `tmp.ly'
Parsing...
Interpreting music...[8]
Preprocessing graphical objects...
Finding the ideal number of pages...
Fitting music on 1 or 2 pages...
Drawing systems...
Converting to `tmp.pdf'...
Success: compilation successfully completed

I’m positively impressed by the ease of installation and execution speed. It also works with svg or png instead of pdf. Cool.

We could this in Lino. Not yet sure how exactly. Wikimedia has Extension:Score but the Lino way would probably be to have a music plugin with a music.Score model, or maybe even a music.Song model with individual text fields like soprano, alto, tenor, bass, lyrics, etc, as I had in songbook.

Sources: